


A Thousand and One Ways to Cook Eggs

by Cerusee



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Bruce falls prey to Millennial stereotypes, Gen, I'm sticking with my headcanon that Bruce is generally a lousy cook, assorted breakfast foods and egg dishes, but an absolute whiz at pancakes and waffles, references to trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-15 00:08:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19284016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerusee/pseuds/Cerusee
Summary: Six times Bruce bonded with a Batkid over breakfast (+ 1 time someone else fedBruce).





	A Thousand and One Ways to Cook Eggs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jerseydevious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/gifts).



Dick looked down the long, winding wooden bannister that circled down from the second floor to the first and thought _I bet I could run down that like a balance beam_. It was only as wide as a man’s hand, but it would be easy, barefoot like this.

The impulse receded as quickly as it had come on, as Dick shuddered, struck again by the memory of the thing he’d spent the whole night dreaming about. He trudged down the stairs, the _boring_ way, swollen-eyed and dazy from interrupted sleep, not knowing what he’d find at the stairs’ bottom.

He found...pancakes.

Mister Bruce Wayne, who he’d met not fourteen hours ago, was standing by the stove of this house’s kitchen, patiently tending a pan. His white shirt sleeves were rolled up, but Dick was pretty sure he was wearing the same dark suit he’d been wearing last night—was it only last night?—when he’d knelt in front of Dick and put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and said _I’m so sorry_.

Bruce Wayne set aside the pan he’d been tending, and turned around. Up close, his face looked scratchy, the way Dad’s face looked when the mornings went too long, and he couldn’t shave.

“Good morning, Dick,” Bruce Wayne said. “I made you something to eat.” He offered Dick a plate stacked with those pancakes, and even as awful as Dick felt just now, the rich, buttery smell was comforting, like when Mom would pull an extra blanket over his shoulders on an October night. “There’s syrup on the table, if you’d like.”

“That’s...super of you, Mr. Wayne,” Dick said quietly, taking the plate with both hands.

When Dick whisper-asked Bruce, at a family breakfast that took place considerably down the line, why Bruce’s pancakes and his waffles were so much better than Alfred’s, even though Alfred was a really good cook and Bruce really wasn’t, Bruce had just whispered back “ _extra egg whites_.”

Which, in Dick’s opinion, didn’t explain much. 

Sometimes you just had to account for Batman being Batman.

***

_Eggs_ , Bruce thought, absently. Eggs were still on the table.

The onions tripped him up. He burned two batches before he learned that he had to cook them very slowly, over low heat. This latest batch didn’t burn, hallelujah. He finally added the peppers, and he was very careful, and they didn’t scorch. He took a measured breath, then poured in the canned tomatoes. Things starting to buzz, and burble, and he didn’t know what to make of that. 

Bruce pivoted away from the stove and read the recipe for the fortieth time. He cracked an egg into the bubbling pan, nudged it anxiously with a spatula, and watched it harden. He sighed, and cracked another egg into the pan. Maybe this egg could rescue the first one.

“Father,” Damian said, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, wrinkling his nose. “What are you _doing?_ ” 

“Making breakfast,” Bruce said, summoning all his parental authority into his voice.

“You’re making it _wrong_ , Father,” Damian said anxiously. “Please step aside.”

“I’m afraid not, Damian,” Bruce said, fighting back a smile. “It’s Father’s Day. You’re supposed to pretend this isn’t awful, even if I burn the eggs.”

“Do I?” Damian said, seriously. “Perhaps, then. If it’s the custom.”

Damian settled into the kitchen table, chin in hands, and watched his father overcook the eggs and underseason the sauce, as Bruce flailed his way through a batch of shakshuka, in a kitchen that Bruce hoped very much could feel like a home.

***

Stephanie was slumped over, dozing, barely having managed to strip off her green gloves before her head hit the table surface.

Bruce wasn’t much better. He’d leaned against every available surface for support for every moment of this process since they’d come up from the Cave, and he’d never regretted the fact of Alfred’s poker night more than just now. He’d managed to get the pan on the stove, to get the egg carton out of the refrigerator, to get the individual eggs out of the carton, even to _crack_ the eggs into a _bowl_ —why couldn’t there just...be bowls there when you needed them? He’d had to get the bowl out, too, which involved opening a cabinet door and reaching up, and that had nearly done him in. He’d stood a long, long time, staring at the bowl of raw eggs, trying to remember what was supposed to happen next. 

Somewhere behind him, he heard a gentle snore.

_Stephanie_.

Oh yes. Salt. Salt for the eggs. And butter for the pan. And...whisking the eggs. That was supposed to happen. It seemed like a lot of work.

Bruce rested his head against a cupboard, and woke up when the burner under his hand came alight. _Damn._

Several minutes later, or perhaps several years, Bruce plopped a cast iron pan of dry, overcooked scrambled eggs directly onto the kitchen table, where it would burn a permanent mark in the wood. “Eat,” he told Stephanie. She lifted her head abruptly, scrubbed at the purplish indent the table had made in her forehead, and blindly accepted a fork from him. 

“This is the worst tofu scramble I’ve ever had,” Stephanie mumbled, through a mouthful of eggs.

“ _Hnn_.”

***

He found her in the graveyard, curled up against a tombstone like it was a couch cushion. Her dark eyes flicked open as he settled near her, although he knew she’d been fully aware of him long before he had her in his sights.

He arranged his cape around him, and brought out the Tupperware. She watched him peaceably, more alert than she let on, he knew, but unworried. Unworried by him. He still didn’t know why that was.

He opened the container, and saw her eyes suddenly widen, as the smell hit her. She leaned forward, eagerly, and started to stretch out a hand, before she hesitated.

“It’s all right,” he said. “These are for you.” Bruce reached out and handed her the container of deviled eggs. 

He’d made them himself, from Martha’s recipe. (With a little assistance from the Internet. And Alfred. And The Joy of Cooking. The recipe hadn’t been very helpful, if he was being honest. How much was “a dusting of paprika” in culinary terms? “A dusting” was not scientific measurement. And was the cornichon strictly necessary? Multiple sources failed to deliver anything approaching a consensus.)

The mystery girl looked intently at him, eyes flickering like lightning over what seemed to be the whole of Bruce—he didn’t think he would have noticed the way she _saw_ , if he hadn’t been looking for it—and then she began cramming the eggs into her mouth at a breathtaking rate, so fast he was worried that she’d choke on them.

“Whoa,” he said, barely aborting a move to stop her hand, instinctively aware that that would go badly. “Slow down there, kiddo, you’ll make yourself sick.” 

She didn’t slow down. Bruce looked over her lean form, and the evident hunger etched into it, and he thought _don’t take things away from this one._ This girl didn’t have enough.

***

“What... _is_ this?” Tim said, blinking over his coffee cup at the plate Bruce had slid under his nose. The plate’s contents were largish, roughly rectangular, and a disturbing kind of green.

“It’s avocado toast,” Bruce rumbled.

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“For breakfast, Tim,” Bruce said. “I’m sure you remember breakfast.”

_But what about_ first _breakfast?_ popped into Tim’s head, and he bit back a laugh. “I ate something a while ago, Bruce, I’m good.”

“I have my doubts,” Bruce said, with a crooked smile, sitting down across the kitchen island with his own coffee in hand. “I’d feel better if I knew you’d eaten something besides coffee and butter rum Lifesavers today.”

_Busted_. But…

“...the thing is,” Tim said, awkwardly, hiding his face behind his coffee. “I _hate_ guacamole.”

“...oh,” Bruce said, blankly, and looked past Tim at the wall. “Is it _guacamole_ , or is it—”

“—I just don’t like avocados,” Tim said. “It’s a texture thing.”

“Well.” Bruce kept looking at the wall. “I apologize, Tim. I suppose I should have...the Wall Street Journal, you know,” he said, as if that was somehow an explanation. “Would it have been better if I'd baked an egg in an avocado? There were a lot of recipes for that.”

“Probably not. Also, Bruce, why the heck were you making breakfast for me in the first place?”

Bruce smiled, wryly. “It was something I tried. Before.”

***

“Hold this,” Jason said, and then darted off.

Bruce patiently held the sieve over the bowl. “There’s something,” he said, drolly, “that Alfred has mentioned to me, when I was much younger, and I was trying—and I admit, failing—to help him cook.”

“What did you say?” came the shout from the pantry, before Jason emerged, with a container of flour under his arm.

“ _Mise en place_ ,” Bruce told him.

“Gesundheit,” Jason said, setting the flour on the counter, and starting to measure it out.

“It’s not—it’s French, Jay-lad, it’s an expression that means ‘things in their place.’”

“Sounds fancy,” Jason said. “Say, Bruce, can you get the eggs?”

Bruce put down the unused sieve, and got the eggs, although he didn’t think Jason had gotten the point. “The idea, as I understand it, is that _before_ you cook, you make sure to have all your ingredients prepared accounted for and arranged in your space. No inefficiencies, no hesitations. It makes things much smoother.”

“Where’s the—oh, I’ve got it, never mind,” Jason said, climbing halfway up the counter and coming down with a jar of cinnamon. “Wait, I need to find the baking powder.” Bruce couldn’t have said where the baking powder was, not with a knife to his kidney, so he simply enjoyed watching Jason crawl around the kitchen like a relentless chipmunk.

Jason eventually assembled all his spell components into a thick batter, which he poured into a muffin pan that Bruce had obligingly sprayed with a vegetal-smelling mist. Jason put them into the oven, ignored them for almost a whole half an hour while he sat curled in the couch, nose in a book, and then, with almost a minute to go, by Bruce’s counting, stood up and ran full-pace back to the kitchen before the timer went off. Bruce followed, and found Jason kneeling by the oven with the rack out, carefully sprinkling sugar over the tops of muffins that, in Bruce’s admittedly un-expert estimation, were looking both fairly well cooked, and fairly appetizing.

“Those look pretty good, son,” Bruce said, trying to remember if Jason’s school had a bake sale coming up, and wondering what his odds were of cadging a free sample from this pan.

“I _hope_ they are,” Jason said. “There's a bake sale next week, so I need you to try this and tell me if it’s good.” He plucked a muffin, still warm, out of its tin, and offered it to Bruce. It smelled like raspberries and toasted sugar. It tasted even better. 

Maybe...everything _was_ in its place.

***

+1

“It’s not much, I’m afraid.”

Bruce stared down the bagel, smeared thick with cream cheese, but not thick enough to obscure the parts that had been burnt and then scraped of their char. He hefted one half of the bagel in his hand—despite the blackened top, it was still soft underneath.

“The precinct toaster isn’t what you’d call a vacation destination,” the policeman said, apologetically.

It really was unappetizing, but he actually was hungry by this point, so he took a bite. And gagged.

“Is it terrible?” the policeman asked, sympathetically.

“It’s awful,” Bruce whispered. It was the first thing he’d said all night. “It’s awful.”

“I’m sorry,” the policeman said, resting a gentle hand on his shoulder. They both knew they weren’t really talking about the bagel.

Hot tears welled up in his eyes. “It’s _awful,_ ” he repeated.

“I know,” the policeman said. “I know. I’m so sorry. Why don’t I get a uniformed man to run out to the diner down the block and get you some eggs or something.”

And Bruce nodded, because why not.

He didn’t really remember this part of the night, later. Not the then-stranger’s hand on his slumped shoulder, or the soggy, burnt bagel, or the pretty good fried eggs and hash browns the sympathetic patrol officer brought back from the diner.

Except for the part of him never, ever, _ever_ forgot it.

**Author's Note:**

> If Dick's section is somewhat reminiscent of [Crepe Suzanne](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16617398), it's because that was more or less what prompted me to write this one.


End file.
